Genevieve Fox's Book Club

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer is a brilliant tale of love, deceit, nationhood
and modernist architecture, finds Genevieve's Book Club

By Genevieve Fox

6:00AM GMT 05 Dec 2009

You’ll remember how everybody got their smalls in a right old twist the last time Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room was suggested as a possible read. Bile flew. Eyeballs popped.

One member didn’t want to waste time on Mawer’s eighth novel on the grounds that, while a great work, be it painting, building or piece of writing, can inspire another artwork, it often falls short. “Take Girl with a Pearl Earring,” she said. “It’s a great painting, but the book is not great literature.

“Why use something famous,” she continued, referring to the modernist Lindauer House that inspired Mawer’s novel, “if, in the end, what we’re being offered is a good yarn, a sensuous setting and a soppy ending? Is the famous thing in some kind of balance with the ideas in the writing, or is the famous thing a prop? I strongly suspect we’ve got prop here.”

Well, I went ahead and read the novel anyway, with a different book group – and guess what? Most of us were mad for this tale of love and deceit, of nationhood, belonging and power, and how language reflects those shifts that unravel around the Second World War.

No sooner had we started slurping our themed borscht, served with rye bread (the novel is set in a Czech town), than the compliments flowed. Everybody thought the daring, sensuous Hana was masterfully drawn, her seduction of the beleaguered Liesel more sensuous still. The skyscraper ego of von Abt, the architect who designs the house for Liesel and her faithless husband Viktor Lindauer, was also convincing.

Von Abt didn’t so much consult with his clients as impose his vision on them. “Typical architect!” went the war cry.

“I wish to create a work of art,” von Abt says early on. “A work that is the very reverse of sculpture: I wish to enclose a space.”

And enclose a space he did, but while its glass and steel structure promised transparency, openness and a break with the past, in reality it was powerless to deliver. It failed to protect its inhabitants from the Nazis, and was turned into a dreadful human laboratory. But even in its early, glory days the symbolic newness and transparency were revealed to be a sham, as anyone connected to the house quickly succumbed to the oldest of human frailties: marital betrayal, secrecy and self-preservation.

The lives within the glass walls were no different, and no better, in some ways, than those lived outside them. For that reason alone, using a modernist masterpiece like the Lindauer House as a metaphor — or prop — seemed rather effective. But not everyone would agree.